The Perks of Being an Open Source User

The world of enterprise IT is seeing a growing trend when it comes to using open source products over proprietary alternatives. Proprietary products play an important role, of course, but they certainly aren’t the only, or the best, option.

To succeed today, companies have to be able to truly examine their current status and decide where they want to be and how they plan to get there. Those that will thrive are the organizations that embrace the right processes, tools and culture.

Open source deployments offer a number of advantages when it comes to this.

Why Go Open Source (News - Alert)?

By its very nature, open source is flexible, and it encourages a culture of cooperation and sharing.

This is a marked difference from the proprietary vendors that have long ruled the roost when it comes to enterprise IT. The sheer transparency of open source makes the process of evaluation far easier, enabling people to more readily determine if it is suited for a specific enterprise.

There is a certain kind of democracy that exists in the open source world. In allowing anyone to contribute code, open source products foster a greater diversity in terms of use cases. More people adding their ideas, their expertise to the mix enables great innovation and leverages the collective knowledge of the greater developer community.

Open source is often praised for its malleability, the way that it can be customized and tailored to fit individual needs. For small customers, it is nearly impossible to get their requirements placed into proprietary software products – the vendors respond to the needs of their largest customers, and smaller customer needs go unaddressed. By contrast, both small and large customers can provide input into open source products, and can even contribute code that implements desired functionality.

Open Source and the Third Platform

The IT world is quickly shifting to the so-called third platform, which serves as the foundation for next generation IT. It comprises cloud computing, mobile, big data and social.

An inherent advantage to open source licensing models is their compatibility for Third Platform applications. And since this is where the tide is shifting, enterprises will do themselves a service by getting aboard.

Third Platform applications are intrinsically load variable, meaning that new instances and/or containers are constantly being started and stopped. Proprietary code products, however, typically are licensed on a perpetual basis per instance/container. For an application with extremely high use, the purchase of all those licenses (many of which will rarely get used) could quickly add up. Proprietary licenses work well for static applications with stable use profiles, but don’t work well for the Third Platform.

Meanwhile, open source licenses allow for applications to be designed to support high load variability with no cost constraints.

So You’ve Decided to Embrace Open Source – Now What?

We’ve gone over the advantages of making open source part of your enterprise’s IT infrastructure. Next comes implementation, and a number of aspects that must be carefully considered. These include:

Identifying critical dependencies: Figure out which components of an open source deployment represent critical dependencies, the ones you must be certain about in regards to community size, maturity and robustness, as well as openness to code contributions and feature suggestions.  

Cultivating open source skills: With open source, staff must be fully willing to get involved with a product and its community, right down to the nitty-gritty. Self-reliance is essential.

Determining what to keep internal: For any code you write, make a decision about where to place it. If you contribute it to the product, your code will become part of the product and be present in future releases.

Being wary of the new legacy: Many IT organizations leverage open source components to build new applications, but seem to forget those applications become an ongoing engineering commitment. Remember that open source can result in legacy too. Just because it’s free and mutable, doesn’t mean that you should automatically decide you’re in the open source-based application business. Be choosy about which areas you take on the responsibility for open source deployment. It’s a powerful tool, but like everything, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Open source isn’t going anywhere; its adoption will only continue to grow and become a much bigger part of every IT organization’s ecosystem. When it comes to staying competitive in the Third Platform world, open source—and the necessary skills associated with it—will be a requirement, not an option.

About the Author: Named by Wired.com as one of the ten most influential persons in cloud computing, Bernard Golden (News - Alert) serves as Vice President, Strategy for ActiveState Software. Prior to ActiveState he was Senior Director, Cloud Computing, for Dell Computer, which he joined when it acquired Enstratius, a leading cloud management software company, where he served as Vice President, Enterprise Solutions.